30 December 2017 3:36 PM

ON Christmas Eve 1976, The Times published a leader entitled “Dialogue With Herod”. Not very ho-ho-ho, but ’76 had not been a particularly ho-ho year. Across the world, liberty, the rule of law, and constitutional government were in retreat: in Africa, where Soviet proxies swept through Mozambique, through much of Angola and were making their presence felt in Rhodesia; in Latin America, where the pendulum was swinging the other way and Argentina had, earlier that year, joined the ranks of the right-wing military dictatorships; in south-east Asia, where the horrors that had followed the collapse of US power in that region continued pretty much unabated.

“According to Freedom House, a New York institute” wrote The Times, “only 19.6 per cent of the world’s inhabitants now live in free countries.”

The point of the “Herod” article was to make everyone aware of how bad things were, an absolute precondition to trying to fight back and improve matters.

Is anyone doing the same in our own country at the end of this particular year? On the eve of 2018, Britain is a country in which the police suppress evidence of innocence in order to hit politically-determined targets for convictions, in which supposedly-cash strapped police forces pursue vendettas against living and even dead VIPs on spurious grounds of “historic abuse”, and in which innocent people’s lives are destroyed by being put on indefinite “police bail”.

Meanwhile, the secret police boast of all the terrorist outrages that they have foiled but are only occasionally able to give details, for “security reasons”. The dastardly nature of the plots concerned is used to justify ever-wider powers for the authorities.

In the courts, judges who can claim to suspect a jury has been “nobbled” can dismiss the jurors and take their place, fulfilling the functions of both judge and jury. Meanwhile, as Daniel Finkelstein pointed out in The Times on November 22, since 2003, allegations against a defendant of one crime can be supported by another allegation of a different, only slightly similar, crime.

Thus a string of weak allegations can be used quite improperly to strengthen each other, like drunks propping each other up.

Public bodies and officials routinely tell lies, to the surprise of few members of the public. Lies about the environmental beneficence of diesel cars, about the “benefits” of HS2, about the rationale for attacking foreign countries (of which weapons of mass destruction was only the most egregious example), about drinking and eating guidelines, about the crime rate, about the prevalence of “hate crime” and the “problem” of modern slavery, a problem the lack of any real statistics about which are said only to highlight its enormity.

Now the authorities want to make us tell lies as well, on pain of ostracism, loss of job or even arrest. To lie that a man can become a woman simply by filling in a form, that it is wrong to object to public functionaries conducting revolting genetic experiments on innocent children in order to “pause puberty”, that it is perfectly in order for MPs to pass a law giving special protection to them and their staffs during election campaigns against “hurtful” criticism, and that having the police patrol the mean streets of Twitter for “inappropriate remarks” is more important than catching criminals.

Welcome to the Goon State.

All the above – and more - is well-known, but is usually seen as a series of disconnected examples of the authorities having lost their way, lost the plot, gone a bit off course. In the Goon State, few things happen by accident and, as Lenin once said, everything is connected to everything else.

Thus it was not despite having been a war hero that Field Marshall Lord Bramall was hounded by the police on totally false charges, but because of it. Muddle-headed priorities are not to blame for the reassignment of police resources to thought crime, sorry, “hate speech”, leaving the population increasingly defenceless against the burglars and shoplifters whom the police rarely investigate. It is deliberate.

The objective in all of this is to browbeat the citizen and expand the reach and power of the Goon State. To take just two examples, the campaign for “social mobility” has nothing much to do with “helping bright kids from poor backgrounds” and everything to do with undermining the middle class professionals and the independent, skilled working class by convincing them that their success is somehow down to cheating.

And official hostility to home schooling and religious education has little to do with “tackling extremism” and everything to do with ending both types of education.

In the Goon State, not only ought no official statements to be believed without objective corroboration, but neither should the supposed rationale for any policy.

At the heart of the Goon State’s modus operandi is the creation of a “second public”, made in its own image. Brecht’s line about how maybe the government should dissolve the people and elect another, more to its liking, is a cliché these days, but we are not far from that in modern Britain.

State front organisations, such as fake charities funded by the taxpayer, and supposedly independent public bodies, insist noisily on one or other policy for which the real, living, breathing public has never shown any enthusiasm, and politicians “respond” to the “demand” that they themselves have orchestrated.

Will 2018 be the year to halt and then reverse the advance of the Goon State? Maybe. It was shortly after The Times leader that the Czechs set up their resistance organisation Charter 77, an early step on the road to 1989.

We must do what we can. In the meantime, I am reminded of Christopher Booker’s observations in the winter of 1978-1979 about life in that very country, communist Czechoslovakia (as was):

“[I]n the interstices of this congealed authoritarianism, people manage to carve out their own warm, intensely private little worlds, preserving their own notions of what is true, what is false, what is important and what simply does not have to be bothered about.”

22 December 2017 11:00 PM

REGULAR reader/s will know that this time of year has me recalling fondly the wise words of a certain Edwin Meese.

He, you may remember, was counsellor to President Reagan and, in December 1983, insisted that Scrooge had received a bad press, adding: “If you really look at the facts, Scrooge didn’t exploit Bob Cratchit. He had his faults, but he wasn’t unfair to anyone.”

Meese was, as you may have guessed, defending the Reagan administration against accusations that its policies towards the poor and hungry called to mind the Victorian miser.

My favourite line from ol’ Ebenezer has nothing to with bah-humbug, are-there-no-workhouses? and the rest, but this exchange with a gentleman who is trying, and failing, to solicit a charitable donation:

“What shall I put you down for?"

"Nothing!" Scrooge replied.

"You wish to be anonymous?"

"I wish to be left alone," said Scrooge.

I know how he feels. Who among us doesn’t want to be left alone? Middle Britons toddle along on, say, £40,000 a year. Getting by, more or less, not asking for anything from anyone else, Mr and Mrs Average. Just leave us alone.

It seems a particularly British quirk that most of us see ourselves as moderate, in-the-middle types, whether in terms of income or anything else: parenthood skills, political views, taste in home decor, choice of car. During a high point of the SDP-Liberal Alliance, Ferdinand Mount, then a political correspondent, noted a new tendency for politicians of all stripes to proclaim their moderation. There ought, he said, to be a way of measuring this, an “effective mildness index”.

Great name.

But when everyone is “in the middle”, no-one is, because the middle can be defined only in relation to extremes. And there is nothing “middle” about our Middle Briton.

According to the Office for National Statistics, average weekly earnings stand at £510, meaning an annual income of not £40,000 or so but £26,520, more than 50 per cent adrift. Of course, there may be perfectly good reasons why this or that Middle Briton may consider themselves to be one of Theresa May’s just about managing (JAM) class. They live in the south-east. There are school fees to pay. The extension cost more than expected.

And so on.

But there is something comical about people who are, in reality, quite well-fixed claiming JAM status, thinking themselves average, somewhere in the middle.

Not even close.

Miscellany on Saturday

SO who won the battle of the Christmas-New Year special editions? In years gone by, it was usually a cinch for The Economist because, no matter how many top-quality articles and reviews the other magazines could pull together, it always offered a pretty-unbeatable bumper package, with erudite pieces on every subject from the role of Our Lady in Muslim theology to the enduring notion of an end of the world.

This year, not so much. The Economist seems to think Harvey Weinstein (someone who has yet to be convicted of any offence) and the subsequent sex-pest furore is the most important story of the year (sorry, North Korean nukes, you just don’t cut it) thus devotes a lot of space to striking worthy poses. Elsewhere, the contents are curiously flat.

Better by far is The Spectator’s effort, with plenty to get stuck into, equally true of Private Eye, which, at £2 costs less than half what the others charge. Speaking of which £4.25 for The Oldie seems quite pricey for what is a somewhat hit and miss publication. I am not sure if the current issue counts as a Christmas special – yes, the big story on the front page features a long-ago London Christmas involving Jimi Hendrix, but it is, curiously, dated January 2018.

The winner? I reckon it is the New Statesman. A very meaty package that will keep you engaged for a fair bit of the festive season and only one dud in the whole thing, some virtue-signalling male bore going on about the (inevitable) “junduh ussues”.

WHAT bliss to be facing ten whole days in a row in which I won’t have to travel by train. That’s a line my younger self would never have written, nor would he have taken pleasure (as I do now) in the thought that he didn’t have to go into a pub again until well into the New Year, by which time all the part-time drinkers will have vanished.

SOMETIME in the mid-Nineties, children’s TV classic Thunderbirds enjoyed a revival, complete with roaring demand for the associated merchandise. Nancy Banks-Smith, legendary critic at The Guardian reviewed one of the (repeated) episodes and noted that a heroic pilot risking his life for others was called “Meddings”.

As was the programme’s special-effects chief the late Derek Meddings, who also worked on James Bond films.

In the 1971 picture Shaft, the office of the eponymous private detective (Richard Roundtree) is next to the premises of an insurance company called Skloot.

The film’s unit production manager is called Stephen Skloot.

At this time of year, Trading Places (1983) comes into its own as a classic Christmas comedy. Early in the film, obnoxious yuppie Louis Winthorpe (Dan Aykroyd) arrives at the grandiose commodities brokerage for which he works. “Good morning Mr Winthorpe,” says a flunky. “Morning Folsey,” replies Winthorpe.

George Folsey Jnr is the film’s executive producer.

Getting your name up there is an established perk of the job, it would seem.

TO end pretty much where we started, with A Christmas Carol. Do you think Meese may not have had a point? Scrooge seems to employ an awful lot of clerks for a small-ish business. What do they all do? I suspect Cratchit & Co are having a laugh. A decent management consultant could prune those overheads without breaking sweat.

But no, he keeps them all in “work”. Perhaps Scrooge was an old softy all along.

16 December 2017 2:11 AM

BEDSITLAND at the very start of the 1980s, a place and a time to ask the big questions.Why are we here?Will the Cruise missile crisis end in nuclear war?Why doesn't my girlfriend look like Sheena Easton?A fourth query presented itself on reading Unemployment (Paladin; 1982) by the seriously excellent Jeremy Seabrook.Why are some people poor?My youthful self thought the answer was obvious. Because the economy was mired in recession, depression or whatever. Occasionally I'd supplement this explanation by adding that the owning class always made sure that the burden of "adjustment" (a euphemism for an economic crisis) fell on the working class.Seabrook put forward a different, novel, and alarming, answer. He said poverty is deliberately fostered by society as a terrible warning to the rest of us as to what is likely to happen should we step off the treadmill of getting and spending. A certain number of visible poor people are needed to scare the rest of us into staying on what the people at the top consider the straight and narrow.Should you doubt this, he added (I am writing in London, my copy of the book is 30 miles away in darkest Sussex, so, apologies, but I have to paraphrase) just remember that it would cost a relatively insignificant sum of money to end the poverty of the poor people, so why don't we do it?As far as I could see, his figures were right. Furthermore, I was (and am), as you will have gathered, a great fan. So why was I reluctant entirely to accept this take on things?Perhaps I sensed then what I understand more completely now, which is that the notion that a fixed sum of money will end poverty is based on a deeply static view of the economy. Let us suppose every single poor person were identified, supplied with their share of the sum calculated to be needed to end poverty (whether in a lump sum or in installments doesn't matter, as it is the principle that counts) and poverty officially declared to be over.If there is one thing that most economists agree upon, it is that incentives matter. There would be a great scramble to qualify for the poverty-eradicating cash, with those just above the threshold finding ingenious ways of appearing to be below it. Trust me - I attended a school ("Chimneys", of fond memory) with an upper limit for parental earnings, to ensure the needier cases got in, yet at the end of term my mother's ageing Cortina would frequently be parked next to a Jaguar or Mercedes or similar.In a sense, that would be the least of the authorities' worries. Generations die and others take their place. What happens when "new" poor people start to appear? Do we have to go through it all again?You could argue we do this already, with an indefinite commitment to pay welfare benefits to whoever happens to qualify at any one time. But Seabrook wasn't talking about welfare benefits but about a transfer of money sufficient to end poverty for good.All this came to mind this week when the Scottish Government announced tax hikes for anyone earning more than £24,000, justified on the basis that only three in ten earners will pay more. But those people won't stay the same. Again, it is an incredibly static view of the economy that is being put forward.Stand by for better-paid Scots suddenly to declare themselves employed in "service companies" based in England.Incentives matter.

1) Miscellany on SaturdayDID you see the political class wants to give itself a new law creating a specific offence of being horrid to parliamentary candidates? The Independent Committee on Standard in Public Life put forward the idea, unsurprising as it may be independent of any particular party but not of the political class in general. Apparently it was reluctant to suggest giving would-be MPs and their staffs this special protection unavailable to the rest of us.You may chose to believe that, ladies and gentlemen. It is entirely a matter for you.Farewell to Omuamua, the "cigar-shaped asteroid" that caused great excitement earlier this week as scientists scrutinised the object for signs that it was, in fact, an alien spacecraft. Key to this would be evidence of engines of some sort. There wasn't any. Undaunted, Yahoo! News reported: "‘Cigar’ asteroid might be an alien probe with broken engines." Yes, or it could simply be, er, a cigar-shaped asteroid.To end where we began, with Jeremy Seabrook. Again, I don't have the book or article to hand, but when researching and writing in the late Seventies, he spent time with some unemployed youths playing pool or snooker or similar and was taken aback by their peculiar acceptance of their dole-queue fate. Did nothing make them angry?Yes, replied one, at last. Rod Stewart. It's a scandal.Finally, Seabrook was getting somewhere, tapping into a vein of anger about the contrast between impoverished teenagers and a show-business millionaire.A scandal, the kid elaborated, that the poor man had to leave the country because his tax bill was so high.

Thanks again for reading and enjoy the weekend.

dan.atkinson@live.co.uk

Europe Didn't Work, by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson is published by Yale University Press

09 December 2017 10:00 PM

I am taking this weekend off having been frantically busy these past couple of weeks. However,m I have review for Lobster magazine Scott Newton's excellent book on recent economic history The Reinvention of Britain 1960-2016 (Routledge; 2017). As soon as it is published, I'll post a link.

01 December 2017 10:10 PM

A few days ago, I came across an intriguing line of argument as to why crypto-currencies in general and Bitcoin in particular do not constitute a bubble.

True, Bitcoin has soared in value from about $800 per coin at the start of the year to more than $9,000, before falling back somewhat, but no way is this some tulip-style speculative mania.

Why not?

Because, Bitcoin is a currency, and one Bitcoin is, and always will be, worth precisely...one Bitcoin.

Presumably, those proposing this notion would have been perfectly happy had they loaded up with dollars in summer 1985, when the US currency, buoyed by high interest rates and the popularity of President Ronald Reagan, was at its peak, having appreciated by 50 per cent against major denominations since 1980, only for it to lose more than 50 per cent in the two years after the Plaza Agreement to bring down its value. Named after the New York hotel that hosted the relevant meeting of the Group of Five (US, Britain, France, West Germany and Japan), the September 1985 deal had been spurred by protests from American industry that an over-valued dollar was throttling exports.

So you've bought dollars at, say, $1.27 to the pound and you're more than happy when they have fallen to $1.67 two years later (more dollars and cents now being needed to buy a pound). I mean, a dollar is still a dollar, isn't it?

At this point, it is customary to draw a distinction between a currency unit as a means of exchange and store of value on the one hand and as a vehicle for investment or speculation on the other. But there is no real difference. Movements in the value of the currency affect exporters, importers, households (to which imported goods become cheaper or more expensive) and, yes, investors and speculators to whom currencies are an "asset class".

A currency is a claim on tangible assets. In the case of legal tender, it is a claim that a creditor can be forced to accept in settlement of a debt. This gives it some sort of anchor in reality, one that Bitcoin does does share. Essentially, however, both Bitcoin and mainstream currencies are exercises in make-believe - they are worth what they are worth at any one time because people believe they are and will take them in payment. For this reason, I have never thought currencies were really suited to investment, other, perhaps, than in the very long term - had someone swapped all their sterling for the German mark at the time of its launch in 1948, they would have made a great deal of money by the time it was replaced by the euro in 1999.

Currencies derive their worth from the goods and services for which they can be exchanged. Inflation can be seen as a type of devaluation, with sterling, for example, losing value not against dollars or euros but against petrol, gym membership, fish fingers or whatever. Seen in this light, to say that a Bitcoin is a Bitcoin is a Bitcoin is as nonsensical as saying the same thing about groceries or tuition fees or airline tickets.

So yes, Bitcoin is a bubble, one that already seems to be bursting. I just hope when it's all over that UK taxpayers aren't asked to bail out the mugs who bought it.

1) Away from prying eyes

BUBBLE or not, demand for crypto-currencies is not going to go away. More than 20 years ago, my old friend Professor Ian Angell of the London School of Economics predicted the current rise of the crypto-currencies (which he called "e-cash") with great precision. Their chief attraction to a global elite was the ability to keep funds away from the grasping hands of politicians.

True, e-cash would be of use also to organised criminals, but Ian wasn't overly bothered by this. One of his favourite observations was that the Mafia takes ten per cent and keeps its word, while the nation-state takes 40 per cent and doesn't.

In this context, there was something rather sweet about the news that the Bank of England is thinking of launching its own crypto-currency. They really don't get it, do they? A crypto-currency issued by the central bank, an arm of the State, would be about as attractive as a heavily-supervised school disco with paper cups of watery punch to a bunch of kids dead set on a pub crawl followed by an all-night boogie.

Unless the Bank is planning to guarantee the same anonymity as available with Bitcoin (and it would be extraordinary were it to do so), its crypto-currency will be dead in the water.

2) Slow Train Going

I can just about remember the last days of steam (a diesel taking us to Hull when I was about two years old broke down, the train had to be rescued by steam locos and the passengers cheered) and recall the melancholia around the Beeching cuts. Now, Chris Grayling, the Transport Secretary, suggests some pre-Beeching lines may re-open.

As someone who, until recently, counted himself a true train lover, why does this not cheer me more than it does? Perhaps it is because the PR mood-music round the Grayling idea is composed (quite rightly, I'd advise the same) to suggest the restoration of a lost era of pipe-smoking stationmasters, dozing dogs basking on sun-soaked platforms, and the rest of the Famous Five rail bliss.

The reality will prove to be more morons in fluorescent bibs bellowing nanny-ish rubbish at the passengers, more worthless "apologies" for the rubbish service, more "security announcements" in which we are urged to report terrorist-related phenomena to a bunch of people who can't run a decent rail service and couldn't be trusted to take a box of matches off a naughty three year-old let alone handle a major security incident.

Is this what we really want?

3) Miscellany on Saturday

THERE was something of a gap in my post of November 18 in which I suggested that increasing numbers of people are employed in roles that involve telling the rest of us what to do. Nowhere did I look at the figures for security guards and similar.

Let me make good that omission. According to the Office for National Statistics, there were 170,000 security guards in the three months April to June 2016, the period in which the figures are drawn up, and this had risen to 186,000 in the same period of this year, a 9.4 per cent increase.

In the category "elementary security occupations", 13,000 people in April-June 2016 became 21,000 in the same period this year, a 61.5 per cent increase. Taking the two together, a payroll of 183,000 has become of 207,000.

I hope we're all feeling secure.

The "sex pests at Westminster row" seems to have gone a bit quiet, but there were reports that MPs are to be given "training" in "consent", presumably to cure them of habits such as sticking their hands up their secretaries' skirts, and similar. It couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of self-important creeps.

That said, do you believe Scotland Yard - heroes of the Lord Bramall, Leon Brittan and Harvey Proctor smear campaigns - on the question of whether Damian Green had porn images on his computer when Plod monstered him in 2008?

Wow, that's uncanny!

Neither do I.

To end where we began, with the 1985 Plaza Agreement. So successful was it that the dollar fell too far, and the Plaza signatories had to reconvene in 1987 to cook up the Louvre Agreement to support the US currency. Why Louvre? In those days, the renowned museum housed the French finance ministry, but not for much longer. Against furious opposition from the Chevalier Humphreys, the ministry was despatched to an ultra-modern building, nicknamed The Tub, in Paris's version of docklands.

At about the same time, there was talk of relocating a major ministry from Whitehall to London docklands. We're still waiting.

Thanks again for reading and enjoy the weekend.

dan.atkinson@live.co.uk

Europe Didn't Work, by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson is published by Yale University Press